Search-engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of modern digital marketing and a great skill to learn if you want to make money online.
Can SEO make you a millionaire? That depends entirely on your skills and ability to scale. The simple answer is that SEO can be a great way to make a decent living, and provided you have the skills to scale an SEO practice, the sky's the limit.
Learning SEO can be a great way to make money online. Once you have the necessary skills you can start ranking your own websites to make money or explore other ways to make money with SEO.
Learning to make money with an SEO business isn’t a fast path to online riches, but it can be an incredible way to make money online. Plus, there’s no limit on how much money you can make if you use your SEO skills to build, rank, and monetize websites.
Let Look Ahead !
Table Of Content
- How to Make Online Money By SEO? Best Ways to Make Money With SEO
- Why is SEO a Great Way to Make Money Online
- Benefits of Learning SEO
- How to Learn SEO and Become an Expert?
- How Much Can You Make from SEO?
How to Make Online Money By SEO? 14 Best Ways to Make Money With SEO
- Start an SEO Business
- Work in an SEO agency
- Dropshipping other products on your website
- Become an SEO Freelancer (Side Hustle)
- Charge for SEO Keyword Research
- Earn Money With Link Building
- Set up a Blog and Make Money From Ads
- Offer SEO consulting services
- Build and Sell an SEO Software Tool
- Sell Micro-SEO Services on Fiverr
- Sell White Label SEO Products and Services]
- Set up a Blog and Make Money from Affiliate Sales
- Sell SEO Copywriting Services
- Create an e-commerce website and sell products
- 1. Start an SEO Business
Website owners are constantly on the lookout for ways they can get new customers and clients. One great vehicle for this is increasing website traffic.
But, increasing traffic to your website isn’t as easy as publishing a few blog posts. As a result, business owners rely on SEO professionals to help generate more search engine traffic on their behalf.
The SEO market only continues to grow. The SEO industry is estimated to be worth over $80 billion.
Once you’ve found some success with your own website, or personal projects, you can take this service to clients.
Now, running an SEO business isn’t for everyone. It can be a ton of work, and managing client relationships and expectations can take up a lot of your time.
That being said, here are some of the pros and cons of starting your own SEO business.
- 2. Work in an SEO agency
By working in an SEO agency, you’ll not only learn technical skills such as website analytics, but will also be exposed to the management side of things by creating presentations and pitching to new clients.
Additionally, you get an opportunity to grow in the company, the chance to learn new skills from peers, job stability and a steady source of income, the opportunity to work with multiple clients and other growth opportunities within the organization.
But there are also some cons, including the inability to choose clients and brands to work with and the need to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. without much flexibility.
- 3. Dropshipping other products on your website
Let’s say you’ve set up an e-commerce website and it’s doing splendidly, but now your customers are seeking new products or maybe you are having a hard time managing inventory.
Dropshipping is the answer !
With dropshipping, you can sell a product through your website without worrying about shipping and fulfillment. It’s a great way to sell products without worrying about manufacturing, inventory or even risking buying products that may not sell.
This model works because it allows anyone to set up an e-commerce business and focus on marketing and scaling instead of worrying about pre-ordering products and shipping.
Here's how it works: An individual places an order from your website. You then share the order information with your drop shipper. Once the order information is received, the drop shipper sends you an invoice for the product sold. The drop shipper mails the package to the customer, and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of keeping inventory or worry about shipping.
It’s important to use appropriate SEO-friendly content, depending on the products you’re planning to sell through your website. For instance, if your niche is “vintage furniture” make sure that you include all the appropriate keywords (three to four search terms) so that your target audience can find your website easily.
Create original and unique product descriptions (instead of copying the same text from the manufacturer’s website) to make the content stand out and make sure you have the right keywords and a personalized tone and voice that your customers are familiar with.
With drop shipping, you can start selling unique products without worrying about shipping and handling, have the freedom to choose products that align with your values and ideals (for instance, if you’re vegan, you can create a niche by selling vegan beauty and skincare products) and diversify your brand by giving your customers something new and unique every other month.
But there are also some things to watch out for: not enough control as shipping and production are handled by a third-party vendor, a lot of competition, not much control over supply-chain, and you may have to deal with legal liability issues.
- 4.Become an SEO Freelancer (Side Hustle)
If you like the idea of running an SEO business, but creating a full-fledged agency is too much work, then consider becoming an SEO or digital marketing freelancer.
If you’ve found a specific part of SEO that you enjoy, then you can offer your services for this specific skill.
For example, maybe you’ve found that you enjoy broken backlink building. You could partner with an agency or webmaster and offer this specific service. Or use a freelancer platform like Upwork and bid on SEO jobs for that skill.
The best thing about freelancing is that it can be done part-time. You can pitch your services, bid on job boards, and take on overflow agency work when you have the time.
As a part-time freelancer, there is a range of different types of projects you can take on, like:
- Keyword research
- SEO audits
- Onsite content optimization
- Backlink building
- How much money can you make?: As a freelancer, your rates depend on experience. You can price per project or per hour, usually, rates fall in the $50-100 per hour range.
- 5. Charge for SEO Keyword Research
One of the easiest ways for making money from SEO is to offer keyword research packages.
Many bloggers, affiliate marketers, and small business owners get stuck on this SEO process and need someone to guide them on what keywords to target for their content. You’d be surprised at how much this SEO service is needed in the digital marketing field.
- How much you can make?: You can charge between $49 to $599 depending on how many keywords you supply in a package: 10, 20, 50, 500, or more.
- 6. Earn Money With Link Building
Whenever an SEO expert polls the community about the SEO task they dislike the most, link building always tops the chart. However, building backlinks is important to rank a web page for competitive search queries.
If you want to make money from SEO, becoming a link builder can be very lucrative. 99% of site owners dont’ want to do the work necessary to build high quality links to their content, so you can do this type of outreach for them and charge a premium for your time.
- How much you can make: The price of link building varies between $100 to $20,000 per month depending on the quality and volume of links being built.
- 7. Set up a Blog and Make Money From Ads
If you have solid SEO skills you can make money from a blog that gets a ton of traffic. One of the easiest forms of blog monetization is paid advertising.
Some of the most popular forms of paid ads include:
- Google Adsense and similar providers like Media.net
- Custom banner ads
- Sponsored content
To find success as a blogger you need a niche that gets a high volume of traffic and doesn’t have extreme levels of competition. For example, the personal finance niche (mentioned above) is one of the most competitive online. Even if you’re an SEO wizard it’s going to take a long time to build up the authority necessary to compete.
You need to find a niche that gets a solid amount of traffic but isn’t insanely competitive. With solid SEO experience, you’ll be able to uncover niches that possess these two qualities.
Monetizing a blog via paid ads is one of the most passive models in existence since you’re getting paid on the volume of traffic and clicks.
Keep in mind to make money off SEO with advertising you’re going to need a very high volume of traffic. If the niche you want to build a website in is limited in terms of traffic, then you may need to monetize in other ways.
- How much money can you make?: Once again, the money you can earn is variable. It depends on the volume of traffic you’re getting and the revenue you’re generating per 1,000 visitors. There are examples of sites earning over $40k per month from ad revenue alone, but it will take time to get to this level.
- 8. Offer SEO consulting services
With SEO consulting services, you can help clients meet their business goals by increasing traffic to their website and boosting sales.
An SEO consultant provides valuable search insight to their clients to help improve their SEO ranking and increase organic traffic. They help clients with keyword research, website auditing, technical SEO and developing effective SEO strategies that can be implemented on various platforms, among other things.
SEO consultants also perform competitor SEO analysis and share detailed plans on how to leverage this data, whether that applies to the content strategy, backlink strategy or particular keywords that they are using. An SEO consultant is also good at changing plans by taking into account new SEO trends and Google algorithm updates.
While this sounds intimidating, it can be a very lucrative and enjoyable career, especially for someone with a fair chunk of experience in an SEO agency.
The pros of SEO consulting include an opportunity to work with new clients, flexibility to work with clients and brands of your choice and an opportunity to expand and grow your consulting business.
The cons of SEO consulting include the stress of managing clients, difficulty in getting new leads and clients, and it requires extensive experience.
- 9. Build and Sell an SEO Software Tool
Every popular SEO tool started out as just an idea. And some of the best ones are now multi-million dollar companies.
If you can come up with a good way to streamline a common SEO process with software, then you can make a lot of money in SEO. People love to pay for tools that make their work easier in digital marketing.
How much you can make: It all depends on the feature set of your SEO tool and what the market is willing to pay you for it. A simple keyword research tool can easily net you $29 per month while a full-fledged SEO suite can bring in $199 to $499 or more in monthly income.
- 10. Sell Micro-SEO Services on Fiverr
As you know tons of different tasks must be accomplished to effectively execute an SEO campaign. It’s a lot for a single person, let alone a team, to accomplish.
Some common tasks include
- In-depth site audits
- Backlink building
- Content writing
- Outreach for social media
- Technical optimization
- Keyword research
- And more
If you’ve mastered one part of this process, then you can sell these micro-SEO services to companies in need.
For example, SEO agencies and individual website owners are always on the lookout for quality contractors to help execute successful SEO campaigns.
There are a few different ways you can offer your services, but one of the most effective is Fiverr. Fiverr is commonly overlooked since it’s generally associated with cheaper work. However, you can offer upsells on your packages and earn decent money for the tasks you complete.
The key to earning a solid income on Fiverr is to establish yourself as an expert in a given area. You want to choose a task that you know you can execute and get solid ratings from your customers.
Fiverr (and other freelance marketplaces like Upwork) can be very beneficial, for example...
- You can quickly rise in the rankings if your work is good
- You can deliver work fast and get paid fast
- There’s a near-endless amount of leads you can tap into
However, there is a limit to how much you can earn on Fiverr. It’s a great place to start your SEO career, but probably not a platform you’ll want to use forever.
- How much money can you make?: The gigs you offer on Fiverr start at $5, however, you can really start to earn by offering upgrades and higher-level packages. Some freelancers are earning between $2-3k per month.
- 11. Sell White Label SEO Products and Services
A white label product is a product or service that’s created a company (the producer) without any branding on it. This allows marketers to sell the product or service as their own while the producer maintains the upkeep of the product or does all of the work.
Common examples of SEO white labeling include keyword research tools, SEO tracking and reporting dashboards, and link building services. You can sell these products and services with your own brand name on them but the fulfillment is done by a third-party business.
- How much you can make: There’s no limit to how much you can earn by white labeling SEO products and services.
- 12. Set up a Blog and Make Money from Affiliate Sales
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. It is competitive, but as someone with actual SEO skills, you have a much greater chance of success.
There’s no limit to how big of a site you can build as an affiliate. You have single-person blogs, all the way up to massive sites like NerdWallet and The WireCutter, which are large-scale affiliate sites.
With affiliate marketing, you promote high-quality products in exchange for a commission when someone decides to buy through your affiliate link.
There are SEO affiliate programs with products related to SEO and digital marketing but there are also affiliate programs for all kinds of niches.
After selecting the products to promote, the next step is to write the right type of content. The most common form of affiliate posts is “best of” posts and “product reviews”.
When a searcher is typing these kinds of keywords into Google they’re in the buying phase. So, if they click over to your site, there’s a good chance they’re going to buy from your link.
Building a successful affiliate site via SEO is a truly passive income. However, you are reliant on organic traffic, and the payouts from vendors (which can change).
- How much money can you make?: Making money with affiliate marketing has a wide range of income potential, but there are examples of sites earning millions of dollars in affiliate commissions, and even solo blogs earning over $100k.
- 13.Sell SEO Copywriting Services
Writers are a dime a dozen these days and most freelancer writers pay zero attention to optimizing their content for SEO. They just want to finish the work in as little time as possible and have no incentive to write content that ranks for your target keywords.
As an SEO copywriter, you can gain a competitive edge in the writing industry and charge customers for highly-optimized content that can rank in Google as soon as it’s published. And charge a premium for it.
- How much you can make?:A good SEO copywriter can earn between $.07 to $2 per word which translates into $70 to $200 per 1,000 words of optimized content.
- 14. Create an e-commerce website and sell products
If you have deep knowledge of ecommerce SEO, you can use search-engine optimization to sell physical products through an ecommerce website.
Start by picking your niche and finalizing the product you’ll be selling. You can do that by doing keyword and audience research to understand which keywords your potential customers are using to find this particular product.
For instance, if you find a keyword such as “stainless steel pasta maker” that gets a lot of traction but there aren’t enough companies selling this product, you can figure out the demand for a particular product and then plan to sell these products on your ecommerce website.
Before you decide, make sure you also perform an in-depth SEO competitor analysis; that's the only way to figure out how much it will take to rank in the first positions for your target keywords.
Ecommerce sites allow full control over branding and messaging. Moreover, the ecommerce market is booming, and it’s a lucrative choice to invest in it. Of course, it also provides a good source of income.
But there's also an element of unpredictability, as you may have difficulty finding customers for your product, and scaling may prove to be a challenge.
How Much Can You Make from SEO?
I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to make money with SEO.
As you discovered, there are plenty of ways for making money from SEO and you can choose the method that best meets your long-term goals and personal work preferences.
Having a skillset in search engine optimization is a great way to earn a solid living and secure a good financial future for years to come because SEO is only getting more important for businesses as the years go on.